[Ted Joyce]

Michael,
Thanks for the reply.

The reason I am going to tape is for convenience and for additional archival security. I transferred the 15 year old 4:3 16mm film anamorphically filling the entire 16X9 HD frame. (I was thinking I might need the extra pixels to capture the entire resolution of the film) I’ve used the Kon’s amorphic downcovert option to restore the 4:3 aspect into NTSC. This is for quick and easy screenings and has worked well.

I’ve done some tests with the Kona3 – downcoverting to NTSC and then up-ressing back to HD and putting it next to the original in the same timeline. I evaluated this on several HD monitors. I was surprized at the minimal visual quality loss (primarily ~50% vertical resolution loss). It seems that the original film’s resolution could largely be captured by progressive 525 video.

Question: If I use Compressor, can I anamophically squeeze it to 4:3? How long would it take to render 3 1/2 hrs. of HD material on my 8 core 3.2Mhz Mac to progressive 24frame NTSC and then author to DVD’s? For reviewing copies it is hard to beat the speed of realtime playback into a standalone DVD burner. This is why I am seeking a way to get progressive NTSC out of the Kona.

[Ted Joyce]

Dear Jerramy,

I am unsure if if even want to use the M100 HD producer rather than FC Pro. I want to do a 14 day test and move slowly into it.
I’ve 4 or 5 old M100 pgms that I’d like to get into periodically, possibly port to FC. If HD M100 is as easy to use as the old m100i I may want to move into the full HD suite.

I do mostly long form programs. I currently doing 2 2 1/2hr 5 camera 16mm films telecined to 1080p/24 ProRes4:2:2HQ files (sync, edit, color correct etc). FC is slow and clunkly w/ this much material on a timeline. When I turn video tracks on and off as I do to see different camera angles, it stops to display video for 10 to 20 sec.

Hard drives: I’m using LaCie’s 4Big Quadra w/ its firewire800 ports (it seems to work for now at ~80MPS). I’d planned to use it their w/ eSata PCI card but LaCie don’t sell any that will work reliably with their dirve (it did give 133MPS w/ my frame size in the Kona Test but kept crashing the OS). LaCie says they will have a driverless set of PCI Mac eSata cards coming out in February which should resolve this. They didn’t know of any cards that would work w/ their drives.

[Ted Joyce]

Thanks,
Seems like a lot of work to reload the OS, update & M100 software et all, and a hastle to reboot to use.

Would M100 HD producer also require this? Of course I wouldn’t have access to the Kona outputs but maybe I could install both. Then I could edit w/ producer/and Final Cut as desired and reboot only when I need M100 I/O for capture or layoff.

Is this practical??

[Ted Joyce]

Brent may have moved on but I have a similar problem where whole projects are repeatedly unlinked when I open them. 1080/30 and 1080/24 Prores 422HQ. It is really anoying. Any suggestions?

Latest Mac & OS, 20Gig Ram, Latest FCP

[Ted Joyce]

What is involved in referting back to the earlier drivers? I’ve had the Kona for 3 wks and of course updated the drivers as they suggested which are supposed to improve performance and reliability of the Kona3.

[Ted Joyce]

Great news!
I like the ProRess 4:2:2 HQ codec and Sony’s EX-1 camera codec and assume it will work easily with them. How about stability and crashes compared with FCP?

[Ted Joyce]

I don’t see anything about grain reduction in Scratch. For just grain reduction & possibly some manual dirt removal could I get along with Scratch 3.5? It seems to be available on the web for under $50. I already have an HD8200 workstation and drives which seem to be qualified. Do you think that would work?

Scratch looks similar to Color, but I’ve not heard Color specifically does film grain reduction and sharpening. I believe can reduce grain and noise by bluring the red & blue channels which are not strong enough reduction.

PS I guess David Boogie is suggesting his free plugins. Not sure how they stack up against Scratch.

[Ted Joyce]

What’s the best way to do this NTSC deinterlacing? Will the Kona3 do it on a file or an incoming NTSC SDI input?
I also have an Axio but it doesn’t do 480/29.97P NTSC to progressive, only 24fps or 23.997 etc. like the Kona seems to be limited this same way.

[Ted Joyce]

Is it practical to do long form film grain reduction in After Effects insead? Guess I’d need to export image sequences? Then could I use some of the better grain reduction plug ins for Photoshop? Or do I need an After Effects plugin? Will Kona 3 accellerate any of this? Not sure the render time with this approach but might it be a few seconds per frame on my system? lots of questions, sorry.

[Ted Joyce]

Great,

Guess I’d need to set the DVCam SR VCR’s output PsF rather than P? I assume that is possible. I assume the image quality will be identical using either? The tapes were recorded at Match Frame in LA. I’ll be renting a VCR for the in house capture to ProRes.

Thanks Jeremy!